Saturday, 12 March 2011

Systems engineering topics

Systems engineering tools are strategies, procedures, and techniques that aid in performing systems engineering on a project or product. The purpose of these tools vary from database management, graphical browsing, simulation, and reasoning, to document production, neutral import/export and more.
System

There are many definitions of what a system is in the field of systems engineering. Below are a few authoritative definitions:

* ANSI/EIA-632-1999: "An aggregation of end products and enabling products to achieve a given purpose."
* IEEE Std 1220-1998: "A set or arrangement of elements and processes that are related and whose behavior satisfies customer/operational needs and provides for life cycle sustainment of the products."[29]
* ISO/IEC 15288:2008: "A combination of interacting elements organized to achieve one or more stated purposes."[30]
* NASA Systems Engineering Handbook: "(1) The combination of elements that function together to produce the capability to meet a need. The elements include all hardware, software, equipment, facilities, personnel, processes, and procedures needed for this purpose. (2) The end product (which performs operational functions) and enabling products (which provide life-cycle support services to the operational end products) that make up a system."[31]
* INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook: "homogeneous entity that exhibits predefined behavior in the real world and is composed of heterogeneous parts that do not individually exhibit that behavior and an integrated configuration of components and/or subsystems."[32]
* INCOSE: "A system is a construct or collection of different elements that together produce results not obtainable by the elements alone. The elements, or parts, can include people, hardware, software, facilities, policies, and documents; that is, all things required to produce systems-level results. The results include system level qualities, properties, characteristics, functions, behavior and performance. The value added by the system as a whole, beyond that contributed independently by the parts, is primarily created by the relationship among the parts; that is, how they are interconnected."[33]

The systems engineering process

Depending on their application, tools are used for various stages of the systems engineering process:

Center

Using models

Models play important and diverse roles in systems engineering. A model can be defined in several ways, including:

* An abstraction of reality designed to answer specific questions about the real world
* An imitation, analogue, or representation of a real world process or structure; or
* A conceptual, mathematical, or physical tool to assist a decision maker.

Together, these definitions are broad enough to encompass physical engineering models used in the verification of a system design, as well as schematic models like a functional flow block diagram and mathematical (i.e., quantitative) models used in the trade study process. This section focuses on the last.[34]

The main reason for using mathematical models and diagrams in trade studies is to provide estimates of system effectiveness, performance or technical attributes, and cost from a set of known or estimable quantities. Typically, a collection of separate models is needed to provide all of these outcome variables. The heart of any mathematical model is a set of meaningful quantitative relationships among its inputs and outputs. These relationships can be as simple as adding up constituent quantities to obtain a total, or as complex as a set of differential equations describing the trajectory of a spacecraft in a gravitational field. Ideally, the relationships express causality, not just correlation.[34]
Tools for graphic representations

Initially, when the primary purpose of a systems engineer is to comprehend a complex problem, graphic representations of a system are used to communicate a system's functional and data requirements.[35] Common graphical representations include:

A graphical representation relates the various subsystems or parts of a system through functions, data, or interfaces. Any or each of the above methods are used in an industry based on its requirements. For instance, the N2 chart may be used where interfaces between systems is important. Part of the design phase is to create structural and behavioral models of the system.

Once the requirements are understood, it is now the responsibility of a systems engineer to refine them, and to determine, along with other engineers, the best technology for a job. At this point starting with a trade study, systems engineering encourages the use of weighted choices to determine the best option. A decision matrix, or Pugh method, is one way (QFD is another) to make this choice while considering all criteria that are important. The trade study in turn informs the design which again affects the graphic representations of the system (without changing the requirements). In an SE process, this stage represents the iterative step that is carried out until a feasible solution is found. A decision matrix is often populated using techniques such as statistical analysis, reliability analysis, system dynamics (feedback control), and optimization methods.

At times a systems engineer must assess the existence of feasible solutions, and rarely will customer inputs arrive at only one. Some customer requirements will produce no feasible solution. Constraints must be traded to find one or more feasible solutions. The customers' wants become the most valuable input to such a trade and cannot be assumed. Those wants/desires may only be discovered by the customer once the customer finds that he has overconstrained the problem. Most commonly, many feasible solutions can be found, and a sufficient set of constraints must be defined to produce an optimal solution. This situation is at times advantageous because one can present an opportunity to improve the design towards one or many ends, such as cost or schedule. Various modeling methods can be used to solve the problem including constraints and a cost function.